1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the fields of medicine, pathogenic microbiology and imaging technologies. More specifically, the present invention relates to compounds and reporters useful to detect and locate bacterial pathogens during in vitro or in vivo imaging of a subject.
2. Description of the Related Art
Numerous bacterial infections cause significant morbidity and mortality throughout the world and many of the most important bacterial species are beta-lactamase positive, making them resistant to standard penicillin-like antibiotics. Diagnosis of many of these infections and the presence of penicillin resistance is often difficult and requires extensive diagnostic laboratory culturing prior to susceptibility determination.
For example, tuberculosis currently affects nearly one-third of the world's population and remains a critical public health threat. Concern is greatly heightened when one considers the continued presence of multiple drug resistant and extensively drug resistant strains worldwide, which are not readily treatable. Current methods to quantify and assess the viability of tuberculosis in the laboratory, tissue culture cells and during infection in animal models and humans are limited to determination of colony forming units (CFU) and/or microscopy of tissues and sputum. These methods are time-consuming, often difficult to interpret and relatively insensitive. Most methods require invasive procedures that, in the case of animals and humans, must be carried out postmortem. These inadequacies make it difficult to follow disease progression, vaccine efficacy and therapeutic outcome, both in animal models and patients. Optical imaging methods would allow direct observation of tuberculosis viability during infection, efficacy of therapeutics and localization of bacteria during disease in real-time using live animals in a non-invasive manner.
Thus, there is a recognized need in the art for improved methods for imaging and diagnosing bacterial disease. More specifically, the prior art is deficient in sensitive and specific real-time optical imaging methods for beta-lactamase positive bacteria that can be used in vitro and in live subjects to diagnose and locate the bacterial infection, to rapidly screen for new therapeutics and to identify new drug targets. The present invention fulfills this long-standing need and desire in the art.